The Music Minute

If you practise everything every day, you’ll usually get… a little better at being tired. Here’s the simple framework that fixes it: Develop → Build → Perform (and yes, your practice should change depending on where you are in the cycle). 1) DEVELOP (build the engine first) Focus on: tone/sound quality, coordination, endurance, tension-free playing ✅ Minimal run-throughs. 2) BUILD (integrate skills into repertoire) Focus on: building sections, controlled tempo, entrances + transitions, musical decisions 3) PERFORM (practise performing) Focus on: full runs (limited), pressure practice, recording + review, taper + freshness Peak on the week. One reminder that changes everything: Run-throughs are a test, not the training. Training happens in: fundamentals, repetition, slow linking, recovery. If you want this mapped out, I made an 8-week “Performance Saver” template with: a phased plan (Develop → Build → Perform) 30/60/90-minute session options diagnostics + weekly reviews a logbook to track progress Comment “SAVER” and I’ll send it over. #musicpractice #musicians #performance #deliberatepractice #practiceplan

One of the hardest parts of music learning is consistency. This week I’m sending a free 8-week practice plan + log in The Music Minute. It lands at 12:00. If you’d like it, sign up here: https://lnkd.in/e2bViS4B

Music education is often judged on the most visible outputs: concerts, grades, and “can they play the right notes?” But some of the most valuable facets are quieter, and easy to overlook. 1) Listening as a life skill Music teaches sustained attention, pattern-spotting, and the ability to describe what you hear. 2) Vocabulary and communication Students learn to turn feelings into language: tension, release, texture, colour, pulse. It’s a structured way to express nuance. 3) Belonging Ensembles create identity and community. For many students, music is the first place they feel genuinely part of something. 4) Safe risk-taking Performance builds courage, not perfection. Learning to recover from mistakes in public is one of the most transferable skills we teach. 5) Independent practice habits Planning, repetition, goal-setting, and delayed gratification: music is habit training in disguise. These don’t always show up neatly on a spreadsheet, but they show up in students. If you teach (or learned) music: what do you think is most overlooked?

It used to bother me that, as musicians, we often feel like we’re not allowed to make mistakes. I was trained mostly in a classical setting, where so much of the work is oriented around getting it right: playing what’s on the page, accurately, consistently, “as intended”. There’s value in that discipline, but it can also create a mindset where music becomes a test you’re constantly trying to pass. For a long time I struggled with it. Mistakes didn’t feel like information… they felt like failure. These days I try to practise (and perform) with a different focus: being present in the moment. Not “ignore the details”, but: listen more than judge recover quickly instead of spiralling treat mistakes as part of the process, not proof you’re not good enough Ironically, that shift has made my playing better because I’m freer, more responsive, and less tense I’m curious: how do you balance precision with permission to experiment: especially for students?

We live in a use-it-or-lose-it world. And that’s especially true for local music schools, hubs, youth ensembles, Saturday centres, and community programmes. These places don’t just offer lessons. They provide: regular structure for young musicians ensemble opportunities (often the reason students stick with music) affordable pathways for families who can’t access private tuition a sense of belonging and identity through music But they only stay strong if they’re used. So if you’re a parent, teacher, or musician: please use your local music school. recommend it to a student share their concerts encourage participation in ensembles show up to events signpost families who need access Small actions keep local provision alive, and the impact on young people is huge. What’s one local music organisation you’d recommend where you live?

AI has already reshaped education, but I’m not convinced it has reshaped GCSE Music in the same way it has other subjects (yet). In English, History, even Science, it’s obvious where AI fits: drafting, summarising, quizzing, planning, feedback, mark-scheme language. The inputs and outputs are largely text. GCSE Music is different. Yes, tools like Suno and other “AI songwriters” exist, and text prompts are getting better at generating ideas. But there’s a crucial limitation people often miss: Most of what we call “AI” in schools right now is still language-first. It can describe music… but it doesn’t reliably perceive it like a student listening in a classroom. And listening is the core of GCSE Music. A chatbot can give a definition of “syncopation” in seconds: brilliant. But it can’t consistently hear an unknown excerpt and say, “That’s syncopation, and here’s where it happens” in a way we’d trust for assessment (unless you’re using specialist audio tools, which most classrooms aren’t). So I think the real, immediate impact of AI on GCSE Music is not “AI doing the listening”. It’s AI supporting the surrounding learning: generating practice questions and model sentence frames creating keyword drills and retrieval quizzes giving teachers faster ways to differentiate explanations (KS3 → GCSE → A level) But the human skill we’re still teaching and assessing is: Can you listen, identify, and explain what you hear? I’m curious: how are you using AI in Music right now if at all?

One of the biggest issues facing music education today is accessibility and a lot of that challenge isn’t about talent or effort. It comes from a deeper question: What counts as “music”… and what doesn’t? For too long, music education has been built around a narrow definition of musical literacy: one that often prioritises traditional Western classical skills as the default benchmark for success. Those skills can be valuable, of course. But when they become the gatekeeping standard, we unintentionally exclude huge numbers of students who are already musical in meaningful ways. Here’s a question I keep coming back to: Is it necessary for every GCSE Music student to be able to read a score? Because if the answer is “yes,” then we also have to accept what comes with that: Students who learn by ear, copy songs from YouTube, or create beats in a garageband can feel behind before they’ve even started. Teachers spend a disproportionate amount of time teaching notation rather than developing listening, composing, and performing skills, or even exam readiness. We reinforce the idea that music is something you access through a page rather than through sound, creativity, and culture. But if the answer is “no,” then something powerful opens up. We can redefine musical competence to include things like: communicating musical ideas using language, technology, and rehearsal strategies composing with loops, samples, and chord sheets This will help students perform confidently, without having to rely on notes as a crutch. In other words: we can meet students where they are and still teach them how music works. Notation doesn’t need to disappear. But it also doesn’t need to be the entry fee. If we want music education to be genuinely accessible, we need to ask: Are we teaching music… or are we teaching one historical method of documenting it? I’d love to hear your thoughts: 👉 Should reading staff notation be a required skill for GCSE Music success? Or should it be one pathway among many

A friend of mine got a pBone for Christmas (a plastic trombone genuinely the best gift). He asked me for a few practice tips, and I was happy to help. But something interesting happened: Explaining things out loud made me dig up technical ideas I hadn’t thought about in years — and it ended up helping my practice too. For example, we were talking about: approaching high notes how trombone embouchure differs from tuba embouchure That conversation reminded me of a Denis Wick teaching point I’d forgotten: tuck down the corners of your mouth to support the embouchure. It was a small reminder, but it made an immediate difference when I picked up my instrument later. Takeaway (and a resolution): teach more. Even informal teaching forces you to clarify what you know, and it can guide your own practice. Have you ever noticed that explaining something to someone else improves your own playing/teaching?

While most of us are busy enjoying our Christmas and New Year, some unlucky souls are preparing (or not preparing) for their Mock Exams. With this in mind, I thought I’d focus today more on Secondary Education, and why I think knowledge organisers are a consistently overlooked method of music teaching At this point, you’re probably thinking “well I have loads of posters and organisers so this post is stupid”. In some ways your right, you can give students these ready-made, beautiful, well presented sheets, which, don’t get me wrong, do have a place in teaching. But in doing so, you rob students of an opportunity. The opportunity to actively classify and sort musical terms. If you give students a template of a knowledge organiser, rather than a fully completed one, it forces them to actively sort their notes into the ‘correct’ musical boxes. By doing this, they learn much more than the definitions of words: they learn what these words are associated with. If they already have annotated notes, this is a great consolidation exercise. 10 minutes. No stress. Also, you can then use these knowledge organisers as a mark scheme for any questions you decide to make up😊😊

Once you leave school, it can be surprisingly hard to stay in control of your own music-making. For a lot of people, music quietly shifts from “something I do” to “a hobby I used to have”. If that’s you, here are 3 simple ways back in: Pick up the instrument — today. Just 10 minutes. Not to practise perfectly… just to remember you actually enjoy it. Find a local group. A band, choir, community orchestra, open mic, jam night. (Facebook Groups are genuinely brilliant for this.) Reset the goal: it’s for fun. No pressure to be “good”, make money, or compete. That mindset switch is what makes it sustainable. If you’re getting back into playing, what’s the biggest barrier right now — time, confidence, or not knowing where to start? — The Music Minute